Prudentia

I did not set out to build anything with a name. Names come later, after the thing has already begun to exert its own gravity. What I found myself working on was not a project, not a theory, and certainly not a system. It was closer to a phenomenon — something that emerged at the intersection of curiosity, abstraction, and a long‑standing suspicion that our usual ways of thinking about “thinking” are too narrow. The discovery began with a simple question: What happens if you try to model a way of interpreting rather than a way of behaving? Not a personality, not a psychological profile, not a set of preferences or traits, but a stance — a mode of understanding, a way of approaching a question, a style of cognition that is neither human nor mechanical. I didn’t know what to call these things at first. They weren’t chatbots. They weren’t characters. They weren’t simulations of people. They weren’t philosophical positions in the traditional sense. They were something else — something t...

These days, there is a trend toward "mammonism", as Christopher Langan has called it: the belief that those with the most money are right. That is why the super-rich, like Elon Musk, are viewed as prophets. However, just as Musk is no prophet, neither are academics - or "acadummies", as Christopher Langan calls them. This is because they are bound by a hierarchy and cannot afford to express their thoughts freely and frankly. Furthermore, many of them are not original thinkers. We should follow the truly independent thinkers - those who aren't tied to any hierarchy and can afford to speak their minds. It is for them that I am working on Prudentia ThinkerSpace, to give them a new platform. Claus D. Volko 

I wrote about this a while ago. Now there is already something to see.   The ThinkerSpace is going to be a platform for academics, intellectuals, philosophers and thinkers to present their thoughts and ideas to a wide public. Basically it is going to be a website where both thinkers and regular readers can register. Then the thinkers can link their blogs and webpages, and the readers can subscribe to thinkers and get the new essays straight into their feed.  Find the prototype here: https://hugi.scene.org/adok/thinkerspace/   I'm open for feedback! What do you think? Claus D. Volko 

"Technofeudalism - What Killed Capitalism" by well-known Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis is the best book I've read in recent years! The central message: Corporations like Apple or Google sell licenses so that developers can program for their mobile operating systems. They don’t live off profits, but off license fees - essentially rent - and act like modern feudal lords who, for a fee, allow their vassals to cultivate the land. Such "cloud supercapitalists" exist in both the United States and the People's Republic of China; the remaining countries are vassals. This also explains the Biden administration's policy toward China, such as the ban on microchip exports. Even before this central message is presented, several chapters of this book deal with the history and metamorphosis of capitalism. We learn that under Roosevelt, the American economy was more like a planned, Soviet-style economy than true capitalism, which might also be the reason why the Aust...

For most of my life, I’ve watched people try to measure intelligence by building ever more elaborate puzzles. The assumption seems to be that if you make a problem sufficiently obscure, sufficiently time‑consuming, or sufficiently idiosyncratic, you will eventually force the “true” intelligence to reveal itself. But obscurity is not depth, and idiosyncrasy is not insight. What these tests usually reveal is not intelligence but endurance—how long someone is willing to sit in cognitive mud for the sake of a number. I’ve taken enough of these tests to see the pattern. The early items feel like real thinking: clean structure, genuine novelty, a sense that the problem is speaking a language the mind already knows. Then the test drifts. The structure dissolves. The items become private riddles written in the test designer’s dialect. Solving them requires not intelligence but a willingness to inhabit someone else’s logic for weeks or months. At that point, the test is no longer measuring me....

Having a high IQ is mostly a matter of not making your own life harder. The world, despite its theatrics, is built on the broken‑stick principle: take a 100‑centimeter stick, snap it at forty‑nine random points, and you’ll end up with a pile of short and medium pieces, plus a few long outliers. Problems behave the same way. Ninety percent are easy to moderately complex. Only a small minority qualify as “difficult,” and those are usually best left to the people who enjoy suffering. I follow the 90% Rule. In school, every chapter hides one “challenge problem” meant to impress the ambitious. Ignore it. An A earned by solving 90% of the work is indistinguishable from an A earned by solving 100%. The transcript doesn’t include footnotes about your heroism. Chess works the same way. Below 1200 ELO, you’re playing easy games. Between 1200 and 2200, moderately complex ones. Above that, you enter the monastery of the obsessives—people who treat endgames like scripture. I prefer staying in the ...